


What Could Have Been

by ThisWasntTaken



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Dean is a ballerina, F/M, Fluff, M/M, What is Plot?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-18
Updated: 2013-08-18
Packaged: 2017-12-23 21:06:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/931093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisWasntTaken/pseuds/ThisWasntTaken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Based on the tags/discussion on this post: http://skarofalls-gallifreystands.tumblr.com/post/58475147857/snow-white-sweety-goldenwingsofgabriel</p><p>This is an AU of what would have happened if Azazel hadn't come to Mary with a deal so Mary never died, mostly how Dean would have been different. Human!AU because Cas and Gabe are human, but the Campbells were still hunters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Could Have Been

NOVEMBER 1985

“Just let me have Christmas with the boys, and I’ll go,” John says.  
“Okay. But then you have to go,” Mary says.

 

JANUARY 1986

“Dean, I have to go for a while, okay? You be a big boy and take care of Sammy,” John says.  
“Why do you have to go?” Dean asks.  
“Sometimes being an adult is hard,” John says. “Look, I got you this for your birthday. You be a good boy, now, okay?”  
Dean hugs him. “I don’t want you to go.”  
“I have to go. Be a big boy, okay? Take care of Sammy.”

 

JUNE 1986

Walking down the street with his mom and Sam, Dean stops. As his hand slips out of Mary’s, she turns around, picking Sam up and walking back over to Dean. “What’re you looking at, honey?” Dean points into the large window and Mary sees—ballerinas, of all the things that could grab her son’s attention.  
“I wanna do that,” Dean says.  
Mary briefly thinks about what the neighbors might think, but she hasn’t seen Dean so captivated by anything at least since John left, and she really wants that for him. “Why don’t we see if we can sign you up?”  
The big, green eyes and look of wonder that Dean turns to her make anything the neighbors have to say worth it. “Really?”  
“Yeah. Let’s go,” Mary holds out her hand for Dean to take once more, and they go inside.

 

MARCH 1987

“How’re you feeling?” Mary asks.  
“Nervous,” Dean answers.  
“You’ll do great,” Mary promises before planting a kiss on Dean’s forehead. “Grandma D and Grandpa Sam made it. Aunt Ellen and Uncle Bobby are here, too.”  
“Mom! Why did you tell them?”  
“So they could see how good you are. Now go! You’ll be great.”

“Are you nervous?” Deanna asks as Mary takes her seat.  
“Ready to throw up,” Mary assures.  
“I can’t believe he only started in June and he’s the lead boy in the recital. This boy can do whatever he sets his mind to,” Ellen says.  
“That’s what I keep telling him.”

 

JANUARY 1989

“Class, this is Castiel Novak,” Dean’s teacher says, her arms around the obviously nervous boy. “He just moved here from another state, so be nice to him.”

 

MARCH 1989

Sam and Dean walk Mary down the aisle at her wedding to Tim, a doctor who loves her and her kids more than anything.

 

MAY 1989

“Why don’t you speak, weirdo?” a boy demands. As Dean looks closer, he sees Castiel (who is, in fact, a weirdo) cowering in the middle of these boys.  
“Yeah. Say something, freak!” another boy chimes.  
“Hey!” Dean calls. “Leave him alone!”  
“Are you gonna make me?” the first boy asks.

Dean goes home that day with a black eye, but no one ever picks on Castiel again. (And he doesn’t get in trouble, score!)

 

OCTOBER 1990

Sam and Dean get a letter from their dad. There’s a picture of a baby, who the letter calls Adam, their new half-brother, and the letter says that John is at this address to stay and begs them both to write. Dean doesn’t write, but he saves the picture of Adam in his drawer.

 

FEBRUARY 1991

“Did you see the new Spider-Man?” Charlie asks.  
“Duh!” Dean says.  
“I loved it!” the redhead squeals.  
“It was so good!”

 

DECEMBER 1991

“Please, Mom?” Dean asks. “Everyone is going!”  
“Is Castiel going?” Mary asks.  
Dean begins bouncing up and down, channeling his energy to the outside. “Mom! Castiel doesn’t like Star Trek!”  
“You’re only twelve, Dean. I don’t want you staying out that late.”  
“I’m almost thirteen. Please, Mom! Charlie and Benny and I have watched all the other movies together. If I don’t go, they’ll be talking about it and I won’t be able to.”  
Mary sighs. “This once.”  
Dean hugs her. “Thank you!”

 

MAY 1995

“Benny and I are planning a summer-long D&D marathon. Do you wanna come with?” Charlie asks.  
“Yeah!” Dean says. “But I’m helping my Uncle Bobby at his garage in South Dakota.”  
“South Dakota over D&D?” Charlie asks. “Snaps for you.”

 

JULY 1995

“Dean!” Bobby calls. Dean slides out from under the car and wipes his hands. He goes into the house and sees John, a blonde woman, and a little boy. John immediately stands up and hugs him.

“Dad?” Dean asks.  
“It’s so good to see you, Dean. I’ve missed you so much,” John says.  
“Like Hell you have. What are you doing here?”  
“I’m sorry I couldn’t visit in Lawrence. Your mom was pretty adamant I stay away.”  
“Why are you here?”  
“Your mom and I were young, Dean. At first it was a fairytale, but then whatever she saw in me—and, Hell, I still don’t know what that is—wore thin. There has to be more, and we didn’t have more. I think the only reason we stayed together as long as we did was that she didn’t want to ask me to leave you boys.”  
“You left right before my birthday.”  
“She kicked me out in November. I stayed as long as I could.”

 

SEPTEMBER 1995

“What?!” Mary demands.  
“Your dad showed up? Why didn’t you say anything?” Tim asks.  
“You’re my dad,” Dean says. “But John and I spent a lot of time together and he says that his job is moving to a town nearby. If it’s okay with you guys and with Sammy, he wants to move out here. He’s looking at the house down the road, the one next to Cas’.”  
Mary sighs. “How does your brother feel about it?”  
“Ambivalent. He doesn’t even know John; why would he feel anything about it?” Dean asks, then quieter, “He’s not the one who had to watch him leave.”  
Mary hugs him. “It’s up to you, then. If you don’t want him to, you can tell him I said no.” Dean nods.

 

OCTOBER 1995

Sam and Dean are over at the Novak house, the house next door to which John is currently moving into. Sam comes outside with Gabriel and shouts, “Dad!”  
John looks over, heart melting, and is about to shout back when he hears, “Sammy! Mom is sending me to the store to get candy for the trick-or-treaters. Run in and ask Dean if he needs anything,” and sees Sam turn around and run inside. Gabriel stares at John, staring at the encounter, until John goes inside with the box.

 

APRIL 1996

“A recital?” John asks, puzzled.  
“We’re doing Swan Lake, and I’m Prince—you know what? Never mind. It’s stupid,” Dean says.  
“It’s not stupid, Dean. It’s important to you,” Benny says, putting his hand on Dean’s back to give him strength.  
“I’m gonna have to admit that I don’t know much about ballet, but if you’re inviting me, I’ll be there,” John says.  
“No. You think it’s stupid, and I don’t want you there if you’re just gonna think it’s stupid.”  
“I don’t think it’s stupid, Dean. I want to go. When is it?”  
“Friday at eight. Uncle Bobby and Aunt Ellen will be there, too.”  
“Do you think I can get Sammy or Jo to watch Adam? So Kate can come?”  
Dean sours. “Probably not.”  
Still hedging his bets, John lets that pass. “Okay. It’ll probably just be me, then.”

 

AUGUST 1996

“What’s all this?” John asks, opening the door further.  
“I need a huge favor, Dad,” Dean says, leading Benny and Charlie in.  
“What is it?”  
“We need you to take us to Huntsville, Alabama for a Star Trek convention on September 7th and 8th because Mom says we can’t go if an adult doesn’t take us and everyone that’s ever been in Star Trek is gonna be there and it’s in NASA, Dad. We have to go.”  
“I don’t think I’m what your mom has in mind when she says ‘responsible adult,’” John says.  
“I asked if you could do it and she said yes.”  
John sighs. “Okay. I’ll take off work.” Everyone cheers; Dean hugs Charlie and kisses Benny, who then hugs Charlie himself, and they all do a jumpy-dancey sort of thing.  
Dean hugs John, “Thank you so much, Dad!”  
“You’re welcome,” John says. “How about staying for dinner?”  
“I can’t. We’re all meeting a group and LARPing. How about tomorrow?”  
“What is LARPing?”  
“I’ll explain at dinner tomorrow. We have to go. Thanks again, Dad.”  
“Thank you, Mr. Winchester,” Charlie says.  
“Thank you, sir,” Benny says.

 

SEPTEMBER 1996

“Dean, when I agreed to this, I didn’t know Benny was your—” John pauses.  
“My what?” Dean asks.  
“Well, your—I didn’t know that you two were—”  
“Dad, Benny and I are just friends.”  
“You kissed,” John says. “And you were holding hands when you came over to invite me to your recital.”  
“We were dating, but we’re not anymore. We decided that we’re better as friends. I guess it’s been pretty obvious to them for a long time that I’m interested in someone else.”  
“Charlie?” John hopes.  
“Charlie is one hundred percent gay, and she’s seeing someone,” Dean says.  
“What about you?”  
“I’m probably, like, sixty-five percent gay.”  
John lets his breath out. He can deal with sixty-five percent. “So, who is it you like?”  
“Cas.”  
“The weird kid next door?”  
“Dad!”  
“He is weird,” John says.  
“It’s never gonna go anywhere anyway. We’re just friends.”

*

“ _Slaughterhouse 5_?” John asks. “Is that a school assignment?”  
Dean glances up from his book. “No. I like Vonnegut.”  
“That’s a good idea, brother. What else did you bring?” Benny asks.  
“ _Nineteen Eighty-Four_ , _Brave New World_ , and _Cat’s Cradle_.”  
“Pass me the Huxley, if you don’t mind,” Benny says, and Dean passes _Brave New World_ back. “You want anything, Charlie?”  
“Did you bring any Steven King?” Charlie asks, and Dean scoffs. “I didn’t think so,” Charlie says, pulling out her copies of _Carrie_ and _Misery_.  
John thinks to himself that geeks may well be the easiest teenagers to handle. At the convention, when—within five minutes—he loses all three of them, he finds himself rethinking that.

 

JANUARY 1997

“Wake up, birthday boy,” Mary says.  
“Mom. I’m eighteen now. Don’t you think that’s a bit too old to be getting up at the crack of dawn for birthdays?”  
“Never too old, Dean. Come on; I made breakfast.” Dean follows her into the kitchen.

“Happy birthday, Dean,” Castiel says as Dean comes in.  
“Cas? Gabe? What are you doing here?” Dean asks.  
“It’s your eighteenth birthday, idiot. You were there for mine,” Gabriel says.  
“But that was because I’d spent the night with Cas. I didn’t intend to be there.”  
“I’ll just leave, then. Geez!”  
“Don’t go, Gabe,” Sam says, and Dean almost growls.  
“Oh no! It must be a full moon! Dean is turning into,” Gabriel gasps, “an overprotective brother!”  
“That sounds like a B-rate horror movie, Gabe. Stop it,” Sam says.

The six of them have breakfast together, and no one mentions the keys on the table until Dean notices them. “Whose keys are those?”  
Mary only shrugs in response. “Yours,” she dismisses, and the nonchalant way she says it means Dean accept the fact without really registering it. However, he does eventually catch up, and he grabs the keys and runs outside, his breakfast abandoned. Everyone chases after him, and Mary shouts, “Don’t you dare go out that door until I’m there or I will beat you! Eighteen is not too old for me to take you over my knee,” so Dean stops at the door and waits for them. When they’re all ready and Dean gets outside, John is circling the car, which Dean runs to, opening the door and turning the key in the ignition. The car, a 1968 Ford Mustang GT500KR that Dean had become obsessed with while at Bobby’s garage/salvage yard, purrs beautifully.  
Dean jumps out of the car and goes to Mary and Tim, the Mustang still running in the background, and hugs them tightly, “Mom! Dad! Thank you guys so much!”  
“You’re welcome, honey. Uncle Bobby is in town, too; he brought it out here, so be sure to tell him thank you, too,” Mary says.  
“He called and said that you had been keeping it as a pet project, asking if he could fix it up and give it to you for your birthday or graduation, and Mom said there was no way you were driving a muscle car, the way you drive in the minivan, but I convinced her,” Tim says.  
“But you have to be careful! If you die in a car accident, I’m going to make Frankenstein out of you and kill you again,” Mary says.  
“Frankenstein is the doctor, Mom. Frankenstein’s monster is the thing that’s ‘ali-ive!’”  
“Excuse me?” Mary asks.  
Dean looks down. “Yes, ma’am,” and Mary kisses his head.

“Hey, Dean. This is a nice car,” John says. “This the same hunk of junk you were working on at Bobby’s?”  
“The very same,” Dean says.  
“It looks good.”  
“That’s mostly thanks to Bobby. I just spent all summer waiting for the right parts.”  
“I remember you putting an engine in it.”  
“Yes, sir. I got most of that done, but the body work and anything that had to be done under the car, I didn’t have time for.”

“This is the first time in a long time that I’ve been able to say this: happy birthday, Dean,” John says.  
Dean hugs him. “Thanks, Dad.”

 

MARCH 1997

“Sammy, what college were you thinking of going to?” Dean asks.  
“You do realize I’m thirteen, right? But I have thought about it. Gabriel is going to a culinary school near Palo Alto, so I was thinking about Stanford’s pre-law program,” Sam says. “Why?”  
“I applied to MIT, Stanford, Caltech, UC Berkley, Cornell, and Princeton, and I got accepted to all of them except Princeton, which hasn’t sent anything back yet.”  
“I guess that’s a good problem to have,” Sam laughs. “Princeton was another choice, since Gabriel will probably have graduated by the time I go to college. If you’re thinking graduate school, though, you’ll still be around for a while. Wow, MIT is a really good school.”  
“The West Coast does sound nice, doesn’t it?”  
“California means earthquakes, though.”  
“And I don’t know how I feel about the ground moving, Sammy.”

 

JUNE 1997

“I’m so proud of you, Dean,” Mary says. “My salutatorian.”  
“I knew I should have kidnapped Cas,” Tim says.  
“Dad!” Dean says.  
“Just for a few days! Just so he missed a test or so and you could beat him.”  
Dean laughs. “If I had to be beaten by anyone, I’m glad it was Cas.”  
“Me, too,” Mary says. “Congratulations, Castiel.”  
“Thank you, Mary. I am going to go hide from Tim now,” Castiel says.

“Dean!” John calls. Dean turns just in time to be tackled by the older man. “I’m so proud of you, son.”  
“Thanks, Dad. I’m glad you could make it.”  
“Not even your angry mother could have kept me away, and Mary is a frightening woman when she’s angry.”  
“That she is,” Dean says, and Mary lands a light punch to his arm.

“How about a picture with your mom and me? Since, genetically speaking, we’re the two responsible for this,” John says.  
“Mom?” Dean asks, and Mary nods. Kate takes the picture.

“Now, one with all my boys?” John asks. Mary steps back and encourages Sam forward (the relationship between Sam and John is that of passing acquaintances, not of father and son), and John gets his first picture with all three sons.

Dean’s speech was fairly run-of-the-mill, but Tim told him not to do the “follow your passions” or “do what you’re good at” speeches because his passion was doing bad comedy and you’re rarely good at anything fresh out of high school, so he instead said to “do something valuable.” It was Castiel’s speech that surprised him, since Castiel had refused to let him see it.

“Good evening, parents, family, teachers, faculty, guests, and my fellow graduates. Traditionally I would start with an overused quote and an inspirational message about how every last one of you can be President of the United States if you only try hard enough, but we won’t live long enough for all of us to serve four-year terms, and after enough of us were impeached or died in office people would stop electing those who graduated from this school. So instead of an overused quote, I’d like to tell you a personal story.

“I moved to Lawrence between Christmas and New Year’s Eve of 1988. I used to be weird, and when I was going over this speech with my brother Gabriel, he kindly informed me that I still am. But the point was, I knew it was going to be hard to make friends. I became incredibly shy and my parents worried because my brothers were making friends and I wasn’t. In fact, my quietness unnerved people and a group of boys set their sights on me, decided that fourth grade—and every other grade after that, if they could help it—was going to be miserable for me. And they were right, for several months. Then on May 2nd, 1989, a boy heard what was going on an began shouting at them. All five of us went home with bloody noses or black eyes that day, but no one ever picked on me again, and I gained a very good friend. If you ask him, Dean Winchester, our salutatorian, he’ll tell you that it was nothing, that anybody would have done it and that he would’ve done it for anybody. He’ll tell you that I _was_ weird, that I was _kind of_ a freak. But I am here to tell you that the small thing Dean Winchester did that day was important, that the thing Dean Winchester thinks nothing of still means the world to me. Cue inspiring message.” Castiel goes on to talk about how other people can make a difference with small acts of kindness for total strangers and how changing someone’s life will mean way more than a yacht when you’re eighty, how that will be what you relish, not your beach houses. In the end, his speech ended up being strikingly similar to Dean’s, despite the fact that Dean (out of petty spite for not being allowed to see Cas’ speech) did not give Cas any clues about the content.

After the ceremony, Dean goes up to Castiel and kisses him soundly. He doesn’t allow himself to think about it, doesn’t allow himself to doubt. He just walks over to Castiel, still in his gown and talking to Gabriel (also in his gown—Gabriel was born in September of 1979 and Castiel in August of 1980, so they’re in the same year in school), and plants one on him. Gabriel whistles and—Dean’s sure—Castiel’s parents frown disapprovingly, but Castiel’s mouth follows when Dean pulls away, and Dean happily returns.

 

JUNE 2001

Sam graduates valedictorian and initially chooses to go to Stanford, since he and Gabriel are currently in a long-distance (more than 1,800 miles long) relationship and he doesn’t want to do that anymore. However, Gabriel persuades him to go to Harvard, on the grounds that it’s a better school and Gabriel, having graduated, can go wherever he wants, so long as he gives his current boss sufficient notice. It doesn’t hurt that Harvard is literally six minutes away from MIT, where Castiel is studying quantum physics and Dean is studying engineering. To celebrate this, Dean decides that a road trip is in order.

 

JUNE 2008

Despite their oft-strained relationship with John, and despite the fact that they are seven and eleven years older than he is, Sam and Dean get along very well with Adam. The summer he graduates—salutatorian; the Winchester boys are quite an intelligent bunch—they take him on their now-annual road trip. In the fall, Adam will be pre-med at Harvard (and find a girlfriend/boyfriend, he hopes), Sam will begin working at Jackman, Carter and Clein law firm (and learn to cook), Gabriel will open his own bakery (and perhaps buy a ring for Sam), Castiel will begin teaching physics at Harvard (and marry Dean), and Dean will begin teaching ballet classes (and keep working his current job as a mechanical engineer) (and marry Cas). Mary, Tim, Kate, John, Charles, and Rebecca couldn’t be prouder of the bunch they’ve raised.


End file.
